This invention relates to a screen printer, more particularly but not exclusively, for the printing of paste material. This invention also relates to a screen printing method.
In a conventional surface mount technology (“SMT”) production line, there is usually one screen printer. However, two or more screen printers may be used to achieve a higher throughput, especially when printing high-volume consumer products such as printed circuit boards (“PCBs”) for mobile phones, automotive components etc. Having more than one screen printer is useful in high mix environments where batch sizes are smaller and the number of line changeovers is higher since when one printer is being reconfigured, the other printer may continue in operation and this reduces line downtime. However, when there is a lull period, the value of the screen printing goes up as compared to the costs of the total line since the two printers are not utilized to their maximum capacity.